How Do You Scale A Fast App In The Cloud?

Rackspace has released a new managed support service for DevOps tools. The new DevOps Automation Service is intended to help developers automate the process of deploying and scaling hybrid cloud infrastructure for "fast-growing" applications, while advancing the adoption of the DevOps methodology among software and IT teams.

This service works by allowing programmers to deploy, scale, and test new configurations in hours. More frequent software releases should, in theory, help improve the quality of software deployments and automating processes will allow organizations to provision servers consistently and free of mistakes typically caused by manual installation and configuration.

"Rather than sacrificing quality or uptime because of avoidable human errors, DevOps methodology and practices of agility and automation can reduce human interaction with code and infrastructure, allowing development and other teams to focus on their primary objectives and business," said 451 Research Senior Analyst Jay Lyman. "This continuous deployment approach to infrastructure can accelerate release time and time-to-market for applications and features by reducing errors and test time and supporting DevOps processes."

"It's hard to find, recruit, and train DevOps talent, so our customers and prospects wanted us to provide the expertise they need to automate their own IT needs," said Jonathan Siegel, product director, Rackspace. "The DevOps Automation Service is comprised of the same tools and best-practices that enabled Rackspace to launch 18 new cloud products, push code into production more than 2,500 times, and run over 15,000 automated tests last year. These tools have had a significant and positive impact on our ability to execute and, through the service, we look to extend the same value to our customers."

Benefits of the new DevOps Automation Service include Enhanced Infrastructure Automation to synchronize development and staging environments with production environment using configuration management tools such as Chef; collect application performance metrics (APM) to view code impact changes with application monitoring tools such as New Relic, stats, Graphite, or Cloud Monitoring; build workflows to automate routine maintenance tasks using workflow automation tools such as Rundeck and Jenkins, aggregate logs from all devices to identify patterns and spot anomalies using log aggregation tools such as logstash; and manage caching needs with tools such as Memcache, Varnish, and more. Multi-server environments are now provisioned in minutes instead of the hours it previously took without automation tools.

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